This site describes one person's practice of the Jivamala, a process of
purification where the individual embarks on a spiritual
journey to remember past lives in order to be free of the bondage
of those lives.

One of the fundamental elements of Buddhism is the doctrine of
reincarnation. Human beings die and are reborn over and over again
because they fail to see things clearly and wake up to the
spiritual emptiness which lies behind
the phenomenal world. It is this false perception
of the nature of things that leads to wrong thinking and wrong behavior,
which in turn causes this painful cycle of death and rebirth.

In the sixth century BCE, when prince Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha)
began his process
of awakening, tradition has it that his first stage of meditation
involved remembering his past lives.

The Jivamala practice maintains that a similar
process can be revealed to and practiced by others
who are on the spiritual path. This site contains detailed
biographies of many lives,
and documents the initiatory Jivamala practice
showing how it works. It also contains descriptions of
many deaths and many afterlives, where several of the past
lives or personalities describe where
their actions and experiences in life led them after death.

The Jivamala practice is ideally performed by renunciants (monks or nuns)
initiated into a
Tantric Buddhist lineage, but is sometimes also practiced by householders.
The Jivamala practice should only be performed under the
direction of an inner
guide, a dakini, or bhairava, or bodhisattva acting as a yidam
(spiritual guide or tutelary deity). In this instance, the
practice of the Jivamala was revealed to a householder by a bhairava.
Although the practitioner had been initiated into the Kagyu sect of
Tibetian Buddhism,
the specific practice was not begun in a traditional
way, since the practice and the associated guide or Yidam were not
handed down to a disciple by a living teacher in a recognized spiritual lineage.

This is a description of a meditative practice based on the life of the
earthly Buddha.

The Purpose of Remembering Past Lives

Many people have used memories of past lives
to bask in the reflected
glory of their former selves, thus increasing egotism and ignorance, and
even causing confusion of identity in the present life. Past lives have
been treated like ancestors, with the individual claiming glory
and fame as a kind of inheritance from their previous selves.
This use of past lives is unacceptable for the Jivamala practice, and
is in direct opposition to the
Buddhist notion that the individual's current
life and problems are a direct result of mistakes in past lives.
Had past lives been lived correctly, the individual would
not have required another incarnation.

From a Buddhist perspective, we can ask the questions:

Why be proud of the mistakes, confusion, and ignorance
of past selves that have led to the prison of one's current
circumstances in life? Why take pride in a disability like spiritual
blindness? Why be proud of wealth and power that have been misused, leading
to rebirth?

The purpose of remembering past lives is not to increase pride,
but rather to increase detachment and purify the individual of residual
karma from those past personalities (jivas). Knowledge of
past lives should bring humility, recognition of the universality of
suffering, and spiritual wisdom.
The jivamala practice also permits an
expansion of personal identity where the self grows beyond the
bounds of an individual ego to
encompass a broader identity which has knowledge of many past selves.

During such experience, one individual temporarily
gains intimate knowledge of a
string of individual selves, and as identity widens, compassion tends to
increase.
This compassion, because it derives from direct experience, can be more powerful
than more common notions of compassion, which are based on
sympathy for the suffering of others. The basis for these more common
feelings of sympathy
is limited because it falls short of the intuitive knowledge of
individual suffering that can come from the experience of past lives.

The First Stage of the Buddha's Enlightenment

The Jivamala meditation is the first of a set of four practices based on the
Buddha's four watches of the night. The later three practices are
described at a separate site, and all four practices are known collectively
as the Bodhi-Tree Meditation which is located at
Wisdom-tree.com.

The basis for the Jivamala practice may be seen in a description of the Buddha's
enlightenment in the Buddhacarita, written by
Asvaghosha in the second century CE. As the
Buddha's enlightenment progressed through various stages, so it is
appropriate for a modern day disciple to pass through those same
stages. The Buddha's stages of liberation are an example for all
who seek liberation.

According to the Buddhacarita, while the Buddha was sitting under the Bodhi Tree, he
first gained mastery over all degrees and kinds of trance states. Then,
during the first watch
of the night, he experienced all his past lives:

In the first watch of the night he recollected the
successive series of his former births. 'There was I so and so; that was
my name; deceased from
there I came here' - in this way he remembered thousands of births,
as though living them over again. When he recalled all his own births and
deaths in all these previous lives of his, the Sage, full of pity, turned
his compassionate mind towards other living beings, and he thought to
himself: 'Again and again they must leave the people they
regard as their own, and must go on elsewhere, and that without ever
stopping. Surely this world is unprotected and helpless, and like a
wheel it turns round and round.' As he continued steadily to recollect
his past thus, he came to the definite conviction that the world of samsara
is as unsubstantial as the pith of a plantain tree.
(From the Buddhacarita of Asvaghosha, cited in Ninian Smart, Sacred
Texts of the World, (Crossroad, 1982), p. 234. Original translation from
E. Conze, Buddhists Texts Through the Ages, (London, Faber, 1954))

At this point, the Buddha proceeded to the second watch of the night
in which he acquired the "supreme heavenly eye" which allowed him to see
further into the nature of samsara, and explore the six worlds of
rebirth.

The Jivamala - The Necklace of Souls

In the meditative practice of the Jivamala, the past lives or
personalities of the
individual are threaded together like
beads on a string in the shape of a necklace.
Each individual life with its karma or jiva**
is visualized as a pearl, shining and
in the shape of perfection.

The dark pearls represent lives that contain destructive karma that
acts like a millstone, limiting the individual in various ways
even in the present life.

The white pearls represent the lives that have been purified
by memory, realization, and atonement. Past passions must be realized
and understood as delusion. Past sins must be realized as wrong or
destructive actions. Past lives must be understood as combinations of good
and bad intentions, as wise choices and errors. The person
must be liberated from unconscious bondage to those lives and
their passions.

The process of remembering one life after another is like going from
bead to bead using a rosary. Each bead contains a mosaic of memories
from a previous incarnation.

To understand the Jivamala practice, it is important to
understand the role of the
guide. Please click on the [ NEXT ] link below to continue.

** Note: The term jiva (or jivatman) is normally used in the Hindu tradition
to denote a single separate soul which reincarnates many times.
In the context of the Jivamala practice, it
refers to the organization of karma which forms the basis for the
individual personality developed over a single lifetime.